About
Koshin Paley Ellison is a meditation teacher affiliated with the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Limited biographical information is available in the provided source material.
Teaching focus
His teaching combines Zen practice with contemplative chaplaincy work, particularly around dying, grief, and end-of-life care. The New York Zen Center offers chaplaincy training programs and broader Zen sangha practice. The work draws on Zen practice as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. Zazen sits at the center of the practice, with breath and posture as the steady anchors. Koan practice or shikantaza enters depending on the lineage stream, and the teaching emphasizes direct present recognition rather than discursive elaboration. Lovingkindness gets serious time on retreat, treated as central practice rather than supplemental, and the broader brahmavihara framework offers additional ground for the slower work of equanimity and forgiveness. Daily-life integration runs through the recorded teaching as a steady concern. The same awareness that opens during a sit is the awareness that meets traffic, family, and work, and the teaching keeps coming back to that continuity rather than treating retreat as a separate world. Across the recorded teaching runs a steady commitment to the actual work of practice, the slow unfolding that doesn't always make for inspirational soundbites but that carries the path forward across years of sitting. Across the work runs a careful refusal to oversell. The teaching points students toward what practice can actually do rather than what students might wish it would do, and that honesty becomes part of the trust students develop in the teacher's voice.
Background
Koshin Paley Ellison is an established teacher in the Zen and Vipassana tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Koshin Paley Ellison is a meditation teacher affiliated with Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. He's a Zen sensei and the co-founder of New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, a leading institution for Buddhist chaplaincy training. He's an authorized teacher in the Soto Zen tradition. The teacher's recorded material is mostly hosted through affiliated centers and personal platforms rather than through Dharma Seed. Established teachers occupy a useful middle position in the directory, with enough recorded teaching to give students a sustained body of work to study, and enough ongoing practice to keep developing. The recordings carry a quiet warmth and an attentive specificity, the kind of teaching that rewards careful listening over time. Like many teachers in the wider Insight community, this teacher's path includes time on long silent retreat, ongoing study with senior teachers, and gradual integration of teaching responsibility through co-teaching and small local programs before stepping into broader retreat work. That apprenticeship model shapes the careful pacing of the teaching. Students who follow a single teacher's archive over time tend to pick up not only practice instructions but a quality of attention, the way the teacher meets restlessness, doubt, or sudden opening, and that transmission across recordings is part of what makes a sustained body of recorded work valuable for practice over years rather than weeks. Koshin Paley Ellison's work has also extended into broader contemplative care offerings beyond Buddhist chaplaincy, addressing how presence and attention show up in everyday caregiving contexts. The integration of Zen practice with care work is part of what has made the New York Zen Center an unusual institution in the contemporary Western Zen scene.
Lineage
Koshin Paley Ellison is a Zen sensei in the Soto Zen tradition and co-founder of New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care with Chodo Robert Campbell. The teacher holds full monastic ordination and teaches from inside that renunciate framing. He's co-founder of New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and is affiliated with Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.
What to expect
Programs at New York Zen Center and at BCBS combine Zen practice with chaplaincy training. Programs are accessible to both clinical chaplains and general Zen practitioners. Retreats run on a Zen schedule with multiple zazen periods, kinhin walking practice, and dokusan or work practice depending on the lineage. The pacing is structured and the silence is firm. The atmosphere is warm and committed rather than performance-oriented, with serious dharma underneath an accessible surface. For practitioners working at distance, recorded talks and online programs often offer a good initial point of contact, with in-person retreat following once the teaching voice and approach have become familiar.
